Yelp Reviews – Should you buy them?

Money can buy a lot of things, even a good business reputation! You can get online reviews and use them as an effective way to boost your online reputation as they act as word of mouth and make potential customers trust you over a business with negative or no reviews! Talking about Yelp, one of the most trusted platforms for your potential customers to consider before choosing you! They read the reviews and rely on them before making the final purchasing decision. Out of all the other reasons that can make you buy Yelp reviews, here are a few more reasons-

To Boost Your Star Rating on Yelp Quickly

When Yelp reviews are consistently 5-stars, the overall rating goes up. An organic search engine ranking with a high star rating means more visibility on Bing and Google, as well as Yelp. It is possible for your business to climb the ranks faster if you buy 5-star reviews.

To Bury a Negative Review

You may get consistently good ratings from customers, but your business had a bad apple employee who was rude to them. Your online reputation can be marred by a bad Yelp review after one bad day at work. If you have received a poor review, you will obviously want to respond immediately to it and make it right, but that doesn’t mean they will change their minds. It is possible to purchase positive reviews to hide unfavorable reviews in this situation.

If You’ve Been Given Many Negative Reviews

Often, when a business changes leadership, the new management inherits poor reviews. For example, if you just bought a car dealership, and the previous owner had one-star Yelp reviews accusing your business of selling lemons, not honoring warranties, or other serious reputation-damaging issues. To quickly improve your online reputation, it’s a good idea to buy positive Yelp reviews until you can generate them yourself.

If a competitor left fake negative reviews

Because it is so easy to create an account and leave a review, Yelp can sometimes be abused against honest business owners. In the same way that you can buy positive reviews on Yelp, your competitor can either pay third parties to leave one-star reviews or offer incentives to reviewers to leave negative reviews.

Paid Yelp reviews: How to Buy Them

In the event you choose to ignore Yelp’s guidelines and buy fake reviews anyway, you are likely to wind up on one of these paths.

Get positive Yelp reviews from a third party
As reported by the New York Times, some businesses have hired a third party to populate Yelp reviews for them using services. Yelp review buyers have even gone so far as to provide the written text of each review of an organization, including natural typos, in order to make their reviews appear more genuine. False reviews are the last thing companies who buy fake reviews want – and they are what they get when they hire third parties to create false reviews.

Encourage your employees to write positive Yelp reviews
Companies often pay their employees or friends to generate good reviews for their products. Employees may also be paid to open fake Yelp accounts and leave reviews while away from work. The benefit of this is that businesses can control how and how often reviews are left-but it doesn’t take a detective to figure out if all your positive reviews are from employees.

Provide Yelp reviews incentives to your customers
As one of the ways other than paid Yelp reviews, there is one more way to get Yelp reviews. Customers are often encouraged to leave positive reviews on Yelp through incentives. A lot of businesses achieve this by offering the incentive in person at their locations by giving you a free gift or coupon for your next visit if you leave a Yelp review. Review guidelines state that this is against the terms and may result in your listing being removed.

The legality of this practice makes sense—it can lead to positive reviews from real customers that can be diverse and positive.

In this case, you shouldn’t announce a discount on your Facebook page if your followers write good Yelp reviews. Doing this is clearly illegal.

Yelp reviews: What impact do they have on visits?

I think it’s important to mention that reviews play a large role in someone’s decision to use Yelp (ok, I’ll stop rubbing that in), so let’s focus on the impact reviews have on a person’s decision to use Yelp at all. The surprising finding was that 45% of respondents couldn’t decide whether reviews were that important. 43.7%, on the other hand, said reviews are a major reason they visit the app or use it, while 11.1% have little regard for reviews.

What is the purpose of this data? Yelp’s struggle to promote reviews should be reexamined. It provides an interesting viewpoint on online reputation. The company explained to Mashable they penalize businesses that ask for reviews on their platform because they want to ensure consumer equality. According to them, consumer reviews are not the primary reason for using the platform, which we just debunked above.

As consumers, we do not believe they want to be treated like promotional vehicles.

You may want to rethink things, Yelp. Consumers have historically been the promotion vehicle for successful businesses.

The final takeaways!

Negative Yelp reviews hurt business. A study has shown how much extra revenue a restaurant can earn with just one more star. In any case, maintaining a rating of four to five stars is crucial. This can be done by having people you know leave positive reviews. Alternatively, others may hire reviewers. A careful reader can usually tell when a review is genuine, thus be very cautious when you buy Yelp reviews.